Hazardous Migration

Bhaskar Majumder

Can inter-state migration be hazardous? If the appeal of the Chief Minister of West Bengal in August 2025for the migrant workers to come back to West Bengal is taken seriously, then it is hazardous. Because the apprehension is that the Bengali inter-state migrant workers are not safe in many of the other states in India that pledges occupational freedom and migration. This needs elaboration.

Of late, it came through media that some of the Bengali workers in Delhi and elsewhere were assaulted for they were diagnosed to be Bangladeshi for their intonation in speaking supposedly reflected that of the people of Bangladesh. This raises questions.

Sections of people taking law in their hands in the public with serious socio-cultural consequences is extra-law adventure and the state silence on this may imply state support for this.

The core state has several institutions to identify who are the Indian nationals and who not. Or to make it more precise for administration, who are the citizens and who not. India being a federal country, it can rely on the states on the border of both east and west to advice how this is to be done rather than keeping silence or accusing some specific ethnic group or some specific state. The migration question is more than a political question–it involves livelihood of the households of the migrant workers. In many cases, this is family migration like in brick kilns.

Migration is more than a relocation of labour by labour-hours; the migrants are ill-informed or non-informed in most of the cases about their accommodation and subsequent rent to be paid or wage-cut etc. There are issues related to getting food grains from the fair price shops at the destination and medical care, apart from scope for their children to get admission in schools if their families accompany them to the destination. In long-distance migration it is not easy to come back abruptly without earning adequate to support logistics. The Chief Minister of West Bengal has appealed in August 2025, if Media reports are to be taken seriously, the migrant Bengali workers to come back on the pledge to give each one of them Rs 5,000 as ‘Bhata’ (money assistance per person per month) that seems a Herculean task. This is not to be read as ‘reverse migration’–it seems some sort of an attempt for ‘migration reversed’ because migration was understood to be linguistically hazardous.

Migration is nothing new in the economic-cultural history of mankind. People had a natural tendency to know what were there beyond the given boundary of the country that they had been residing–even to cross the ocean and the Himalayas. Money-based economy subsequently offered the economists an opportunity to describe migration of people as migration of workers for positive wage-differential. Economists’ assumption is very much myopic in absence of wage-work for the workers at the root–they migrate off-season to earn any wage rate.

The issue is bigger than economic migration of late. A sponsored unfriendly relation with the neighbour small country Bangladesh has taught many people to identify migrant Bengali workers as Bangladeshi workers who infiltrated into West Bengal that is a part of India and got engaged in any work. The nature of India’s economy being unorganised or informal mostly, this speculation gains ground for they could easily mix with others.

The problem is much bigger than what is narrated above. People will move out from the poorer region to the less poor region that stands for rural to urban, intra-state migration, inter-state migration and as an extension cross-border migration. Pre-1914 there was no problem and it was not seen as unwelcome. In fact, labourers from poorer region were seen as means of asset creation in the colonising country. History started changing fast since the days of Great Depression (1929-1933). However, it is yet to be discovered how Bengalis come into the focus being unwelcome migrant workers outside West Bengal.

Relocation of labour is not linguistically determined. Workers of Orissa migrate to Gujarat; workers of Bihar move to almost everywhere in India that was mainly West Bengal till 1970s. Economists might not have observed the whole of it, naturally. In many situations, workers of Bihar followed the Marwaris of Rajasthan, even if it was remote Meghalaya that was part of greater Assam. Bengalis migrated to Burma, now called Myanmar. Marital relations oriented and reoriented the family compositions so that at a later stage in history if some families move out from Myanmar or Bangladesh and search for their root in greater India, it might have been very much possible. In the state of Arunachal Pradesh that was part of greater Assam and partly known as North-East Frontier Agency may show different types of Adivasis and ethnic compositions. Force cannot homogenise them.

People were also drawn as indentured labourers, mainly from Bihar, by the British coloniser to fix in countries that Britain ruled. If some of these people come back in search of their root in India, what happens to the thinking and actions of the state and concerned non-state extra-law actors?

The countries called advanced today understood very well the cause of wealth of nations–it was labour-determined and many of these labourers were drawn from their colonies. The history of Asia, particularly India, may provide the evidence–Indian labourers added to the wealth of Britain documented as ‘wealth of nations’. If the migration of Bengali or Bihari is juxtaposed inter-state, then the parallel is generation of wealth first in that destination. If this is so, there is no reason why a particular linguistic group is to be evicted or crowded out–economics argues for comparative cost in production and hence migration is no exception.

It is, however, not obvious in the zone where Bengalis are being diagnosed as Bangladeshis and inhumanly treated what the reaction of the capital controllers is for the reason may be that the issue is in extra-law hands and because it has become a political-ethnic issue. Also, this silence may be because most of the migrant workers are in the unorganised segment of the economy.

The workers are not beggars–they ask for ‘Roji-Roti’, not only ‘Roti’. That dignity of labour associated with the labourers need to be ensured by the state. The question is not if he/she is a Bengali labourer or a Bihari labourer. Labour needs safety just as capital needs safety. This labour safety is different from economic returns on labour–this includes safety of dignity of labour and the labourer.

[Bhaskar Majumder, Professor of Economics (Retd.), G.B. Pant Social Science Institute, Allahabad–21101]